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May 31, 2017

Requirements take effect this week under the FDA’s new Food Safety Verification Program (FSVP), which makes retailers and other businesses that import food into the United States responsible for verifying that the food has been produced in a manner that meets applicable U.S. safety standards.

FSVP is one of the seven foundational rules of the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the most sweeping reform of our food safety laws in more than 70 years. It aims to ensure the U.S. food supply is safe by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it.

A central tenet of the FSVP is that the same preventive food safety standards should apply to all food consumed in the U.S., regardless of where the food is produced. The FSVP therefore requires that importers have a program in place to verify that their foreign suppliers are producing food in a manner that

April 5, 2017

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April 5, 2017

Today, FDA announced that it has issued the first three waivers under the Sanitary Transportation of Human and Animal Food Rule, one of the many rules designed to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act. These waivers are for the following entities:

•Businesses holding valid permits that are inspected under the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments’ Grade “A” Milk Safety Program, only when transporting Grade “A” milk and milk products.

•Food establishments authorized by the regulatory authority to operate when engaged as receivers, or as shippers and carriers in operations in which food is delivered directly to consumers, or to other locations the establishments or affiliates operate that serve or sell food directly to consumers. (Examples include restaurants, supermarkets and home grocery delivery services.)

•Businesses transporting molluscan shellfish (such as oysters, clams, mussels or scallops) that are certified and inspected under the requirements established by the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference’s

April 3, 2017

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April 3, 2017

There is a recent proliferation of slack fill litigation involving food products – both class and non-class suits. If you are a food manufacturer, distributor or seller, you need to be prepared to deal with these claims. A good starting point, particularly for manufacturers, is to analyze your food packaging designs to determine if and how you can defend them in court, and if not, how you can change your packaging to mitigate your risk against slack fill claims while also preserving the success of your brand. Successful slack fill claims can impose considerable risk, from injunctive relief that disrupts distribution and sales, including product recalls, to the often enormous expense of package design overhauls, which may require you to start all over your branding efforts, to the disgorgement of revenues from sales of violating products.

Slack fill is the difference between the actual capacity of a container and the

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February 15, 2017

The Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act regulates transactions in fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables. It does this in part by creating a general trust for the benefit of produce sellers. In this post written for Bryan Cave’s Bankruptcy and Restructuring Blog, Atlanta Associate Leah Fiorenza McNeill tackles some of the bankruptcy implications of the PACA trust presented by the recent Fifth Circuit opinion in Kingdom Fresh Produce, Inc. v. Stokes Law Office (In re Delta Produce), which found that “the trust structure of PACA mandates that produce sellers be paid in full even prior to the costs of counsel which collected every single dollar needed to pay those very produce sellers’ claims.” Leah concludes:

Kingdom Fresh can be viewed as a victory for produce sellers and other beneficiaries of PACA – once again, such creditors are declared to be first among all other creditors. But its slavish devotion to

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January 4, 2017

California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has extended for another year the regulation allowing businesses to provide a Prop. 65 point-of-sale warning for bisphenol A (BPA) in canned and bottled food and beverage products.

In order to rely on the point-of-sale warning for another year, however, businesses must provide information to OEHHA concerning any such products where BPA has been intentionally added.

The requested information includes the brand name, product description, FDA product category, and UPC code or other specific information. Where bsiphenol A is no longer used in the product but the product is still available in commerce, the last expiration or “use by” date should be given. The information can be provided in a form or template on OEHHA’s website by clicking here.

The regulation allows businesses to rely on the point-of-sale warning through December 30, 2017. After that date, businesses will need to sell

The agency recently released its GRAS final rule for its food additive program, switching reviews from a more formal but slower “petition-based” process to a voluntary “notification” process.

Under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), any substance that is intentionally added to food is a food additive that is subject to premarket review and approval by FDA, unless the substance is generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of its intended use, or unless the use of the substance is otherwise excepted from the definition of a food additive.

The use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food

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